http://servuclean.com/2017 John replies to June Larson’s letters with a complaint about NICAP’s photo analyst, whom he thinks is too quick to dismiss photos. John doesn’t name him, but he was Ralph Rankow. Rankow’s article on the Rex Heflin photos, “Photo Story of Dome-Topped Disc,” appeared in the August 1966 issue of Fate. John also mentions upcoming articles in the December issues of both Playboy and True; neither was published.
We continue with John’s “Official Correspondence” file from 1966. Up next are two letters from June Larson, a friend of Ivan Sanderson and a member of NICAP, who provided UFO clippings to a few researchers. Here, she asks John if his upcoming UFO book is the one he had been working on with Sanderson. That proposed project, Abominable Space Things, was abandoned; I posted the notes and correspondence about it here. She also suggests that John use the book to dismiss “cultists” like Major Wayne Aho and Dr. Frank Stranges, whose titles she suspects are dubious. In the second letter, she explains that she’s reluctant to pass on “the pictures from Norris” until they’ve been analyzed. I think she’s referring to photos taken by James Johnson Kibel in Melbourne on April 2, 1966, then in the possession of Australian researcher Peter Norris.
John writes a long letter, mostly directed to Coral, with a lot of career advice. He advises her not to attack Frank Edwards and his recent UFO book, as she had promised to do. He suggests she write for more lucrative magazines, like the Saturday Evening Post, and reports that he recommended her to Gold Medal books. Her 1962 book The Great Flying Saucer Hoax was not reprinted by Gold Medal, but by Signet, as Flying Saucers: The Startling Evidence of the Invasion from Outer Space. He also has much to say about his own financial woes and his deteriorating relationship with Playboy.
John’s correspondence with Coral Lorenzen continues, with a letter from August 3, 1966. Ms. Lorenzen passes on a letter from Livio Caputo, a writer for the Italian magazine Epoca; needs the photos she lent John, since APRO members James Harder and Allen Utke use them in their lectures; and discusses John Fuller’s Life article about the Betty and Barney Hill case. She also attacks Frank Edwards as a “four-flusher” (there’s a word you don’t hear often) and praises J. Allen Hynek. I checked: Hynek appeared on the Merv Griffin Show on July 13, 1966.
